Yet another twist has turned in the saga of suitors vying for troubled CRM provider Pivotal Software. On Monday, Pivotal's board said it now views the offer tendered by CDC Software, a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinadotcom, as "superior." Last Friday, Pivotal's board, based in Vancouver, Canada, had rejected CDC's offer.

After a whirlwind 34-year career at IBM that culminated in building a partner network for IBM's Tivoli unit, Michael Twomey is calling it quits. Twomey will leave his post as vice president of business development and channels on Jan. 1. Twomey, a tireless traveler for IBM, will assume the chief financial officer's role at NetBotz, a privately held appliance start-up based in Austin, Texas, that's headed by one of Tivoli's founders, Martin Neath. NetBotz is backed by a slew of financial backers including Hill Partners, CenterPoint Ventures, SSM Ventures, Osprey Ventures, QuestMark Partners and Austin Ventures.

Ask Microsoft's CEO a question, and you'll likely get a straight answer. Might not be the one you were looking for, but a strong, succinct answer you'll get just the same. That's what we received when VARBusiness posed questions from readers to Steve Ballmer, the man who has effectively been running Microsoft since Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates moved over to serve as chief software architect three years ago.

The reining in of a pair of high-profile offshore relationships late last month shows how the movement of IT and customer-service operations to lower--cost overseas locales still carries sizable business and public-relations risks.

The industry is all abuzz about strong indications that an IT rebound is well under way. But there are two things you need to know about this bounce-back. First, no one wants to be the first to declare the IT recession over. Second,

Eleven months after debut, vendor realizes goals

Samsung was searching high and low for ways to inject some much-needed energy into its channel business last year. While the company was a proverbial powerhouse in Asia, it didn't have the traction it desired in North America. That changed in January, when Samsung Electronics America, based in Irvine, Calif., dove headlong into the white-box market with a new partner program, which only now is starting to pay off for the vendor.

The IT recession is over, VARBusiness 500 executives say. Our exclusive quarterly survey of VARBusiness 500 solution-provider executives reveals that VARBusiness 500 executives are hiring, expecting big increases in fourth-quarter sales and putting their people to work at rates not seen since the end of the dot-com boom.

The current market seems like a proverbial gold mine for security solutions. With so many companies equipped with little more than a firewall, conventional wisdom says the recent rash of cyberattacks and viruses should spark a trend of increased IT spending for security technology.